This section is intended to provide a background or context to the invention that is recited in the claims. The description herein may include concepts that could be pursued, but are not necessarily ones that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated herein, what is described in this section is not prior art to the description and claims in this application and is not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section. Abbreviations that may be found in the specification and/or the drawing figures are defined below, prior to the claims.
Application service providers (ASPs) provide services to users over networks, such as mobile networks, the Internet, wide-area networks, and the like. The services include searching, video playback, mapping services, and the like. The ASPs and the network providers are engaged in joint partner projects to improve performance of networks, application services, and user satisfaction in mobile networks. It has been widely acknowledged that application usage from certain ASPs account for more than 50 percent of Internet traffic. For instance, Google services such as YouTube, hangout, search, maps are widely used by users. Among these services, Google's YouTube video streaming application alone contributes 95% of Google traffic. Similarly, Netflix uses a large percentage of Internet traffic. Even though traffic volume is high, user experience of these services may be not satisfactory. For instance, frequent video stall while watching a video, buffer under-run, and the like are common reported problems by users in wireless networks. The root cause is that, in wireless networks, bandwidth and latency do not remain constant with time, user location, and network load. Therefore, delivering video sessions, in particular, over a time-varying channel is a challenge. Users often blame the operator of the wireless network for such behavior, but operators often do not have a way to influence a change in network conditions to improve operation of a user's applications.
Network operators and ASPs are working together to have several solutions wherein their ASP services can be improved by combining information from various network sources. See, e.g., Jain, A., et al., “Mobile Throughput Guidance Signaling Protocol,” IETF draft, draft-flinck-mobile-throughput-guidance-00.txt, Oct. 2014. Based on experiments and traces from live operator traffic, the inventors have realized that additional information about the radio network apart from throughput guidance, load, and congestion are required to improve services such as video streaming services.